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4 Ways to Get the Most out of Expectation Surveys

ServiceTrac • September 30th, 2016

Expectation surveys are a useful tool in determining the quality of your senior living facility. However, many facilities and their managers make the mistake of not taking full advantage of the survey results. In order to ensure you get the most out of your expectation survey, it is important to follow up with the results and the wealth of information they hold. There are four main ways that as a senior living facility manager, you can get the most out of your expectation surveys:

No Question Should go Unanswered

As you review the results of your expectation survey, a few questions might come to mind. Why is this score low? Why is one location doing better than others in a certain area? What does this comment mean? How can I improve in this area? All these questions are normal and are good to ask yourself. After you get your results back, you can write down any questions you ask yourself about different results. By writing down your questions, you are more likely to search for an answer. Once you find your answer, you will be able to better evaluate and improve your facility, making it the best senior living facility it can be.

Address the Positive

After receiving your survey results, you should be able to take the negative results and to use them to address potential issues in the foundation of your facility. However, it is important to look at the positive results as well. Although it is easy to spot glaring errors and concern areas from your expectation survey, it is a little more difficult to take results that look fine and to use them to increase the quality of your senior living facility. The way to do this is to look at your survey results while consciously asking yourself “How can I use this information to make my facility better?” Managers can use positive survey results to determine what to expand upon in the business. By expanding in popular areas, your facility can grow in value for both staff and residents. By addressing popular results as well as negative results, you will be able to make happy residents and their families even happier.

Weigh the Importance of Feedback

Every little critique and input from your residents is valuable and it is important to view them as so. However, you must be able to look at results in context so that you are able to address the most vital parts to the quality of your business. For example, if one complaint focuses on the brand of ice cream while another complaint focuses on unsanitary living conditions, it would make more sense to spend greater time and resources on unsanitary living conditions than finding the perfect brand of ice cream. Does this mean that the ice cream feedback is unimportant? No. It just means that the feedback that has the greatest effect on the quality of your senior living facility should be addressed first and foremost.

Use Results to Motivate Staff

Having a motivated, effective staff is one of the most important assets in your facility’s quality. One way that you can use your expectation survey to motivate staff is by offering bonuses or benefits for high satisfaction scores in different departments. Additionally, if there are specific positive comments about certain staff members, you can read these aloud during a staff meeting to give them individual praise for their hard work. Through these steps, your staff will soon realize the importance of keeping residents happy, which will directly translate to higher quality services.

As you put these four points into action, you will be able to better utilize your expectation survey and its results. In turn, your senior living facility will benefit, improving to the best possible quality that it can be.